INVISIBLE HAND

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENTS

Melissa A. Troutman

When I began investigating water contamination related to fracking in 2010, I had no idea it would lead me to a new rights movement. In 2014, I reported on Grant Township, a tiny community in rural Pennsylvania fighting to keep a toxic waste injection well out of their watershed. They passed a local law elevating the community’s rights above the rights of corporations. They also bestowed Nature with certain rights, including the right to thrive and flourish. In 2016, they became the first community to legalize civil disobedience. None of it was “legal” – but that was part of the point.

When I started reporting about fracking, I naively assumed that if pollution occurred it would be dealt with – especially water contamination because, after all, we drink the stuff. I thought the problem was that our elected public officials simply didn’t know about it.

Our legal system is rigged to favor private property, corporations above citizens, above life, above our own government. It’s a system that allows private interests to harm innocent people without their consent, commodifies and destroys Nature, and threatening our survival as a species and planet.

It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way. It has taken decades and countless losses to secure even the most basic rights for slaves, women, and indigenous. Change requires courage and persistence.

Today, a rights movement that began in Pennsylvania about a decade ago is now spreading across the globe. What was started by a small borough in eastern Pennsylvania has inspired countries like Ecuador to add “Rights of Nature” to their their national constitutions.

INVISIBLE HAND will acquaint you with this movement – a revolution to create a new laws that truly protects us and the places we call home.

Joshua B. Pribanic

In college I rented The Corporation (2003) from a local video store who paraded a gateway to great films, in no small way, they altered minds shelf-to-shelf. I can remember how watching that documentary caused me to think about the antithesis of corporate personhood. That the free market and capitalism who birthed corporations didn’t stop there, and unbeknownst to itself, it was establishing ‘Rights of Nature’ as a result of its environmental exploitation; manufacturing its undoing.

As much as INVISIBLE HAND speaks to Rights of Nature it speaks to Human Rights. If rights can be given to a corporation, why not an ecosystem? Are we willing to say as a society that because we cannot interpret or comprehend the voice or language of the environment, that it ceases to speak? And if we establish society alongside Rights of Nature, will it render Human Rights obsolete?

The idea of rights and how important they are to democracy stayed with me. In 2011 I gave my first speech to Bowling Green State University about Rights of Nature mainly in relation to conventional agriculture and genetic engineering. Less than two years later I found those rights spread out on an open table in rural Grant Township, Pennsylvania. Furthermore, this small community of fewer than 800 people used Rights of Nature to radically shift power and began to beat back one of the largest corporate institutions in the United States. It was then for me that the film INVISIBLE HAND had its foundation after years of putting the idea to a canvas. The phenomenon created by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations and perpetuated by 20th century free market advocates and capitalists — ‘invisible hand’ (something Smith referenced as human) — was being replaced by a hand of the environment: it had changed from machine to paw, to hoof, to the wing of the ecosystem.

As corporations in the 21st century have taken over much of the American political system, the people of the United States cannot compete eye-to-eye with the corporate citizen. Out of all these overwhelming concepts — free markets, rights of nature, human rights, corporate personhood — you come to a final question, “Will democracy survive?” and even more jarring “Do Human Rights survive if Rights of Nature is enacted?”

This is not a film about taking sides. It’s a film about seeing the whole picture, about seeing all sides of an idea and witnessing the elephant in the room before it’s extinct. I think INVISIBLE HAND is showing us a new world that when face-to-face with the costs of capitalism Rights of Nature becomes the battle cry of democracy. My hope is that wherever you are, this film can speak to your fight.